An introduction to religious and spiritual experience

Discovery
voyage to the Antarctic in 1924–1928 and was knighted for 
his services to biology. In 1963–1964 he gave the Gifford Lectures, later 
published as 
The Living Stream: A Restatement of Evolution Theory and 
its
Relation to the Spirit of Man
and 
The Divine Flame
. He was awarded 
the Templeton Prize for his work on religious experience.
Hardy thought of humans as spiritual animals, and of religious experi-
ence as a natural phenomenon of evolutionary value. He felt that in 
exploring their environment, humans had become aware of something 
beyond it, a transcendent presence which met them in a different way 
from their everyday experience. In other words, he believed that spiritual-
ity was a natural part of consciousness. 
In order to acquire data in support of his theory, Hardy began a collec-
tion of the experiences of ordinary people, which he obtained first through 
a press agency. He collected experiences related to the spiritual aspects of 
life but not to formal religion. He then placed adverts in the religious 
press, but met with a disappointing lack of response. So he turned to the 
secular newspapers, the
 Guardian
, 
Observer
, 
Times 
and
 Daily Mail
. 
There, after a short article or example of a spiritual experience, he posed 
what is now known as ‘The Hardy Question’:
Have you ever been aware of or influenced by a presence or 
power, whether you call it God or not, which is different from your 
everyday self?
There was an overwhelming response to his appeal, as readers sent in 
accounts of experiences they had never dared share with anyone before, 

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Religious and Spiritual Experience
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for fear of being thought abnormal. This was the beginning of what is 
now an archive of about 6,000 accounts held at the RERC in Lampeter. 
Alister Hardy always thought that spiritual experience was a natural 
human trait and so would be universal. He began the research in the UK 
and wanted it to be extended to other cultures and other faiths. This is 
now happening as today the work is going forward in China, India, Tur-
key, Japan, the USA and South America, enabling the archive to reflect 
experiences from all over the world. 
* * *
There are many interesting cross-references within the text, as people 
and ideas appear in different sections. The work became rather like Indra’s 
Net, an infinite net said to hang above the palace of the king of the Vedic 
gods. At each node of the net there is a jewel, each one reflecting all the 
others. I have decided to let the reader find these connections, rather than 
indicate them in the text. Alternatively, good use might be made of the 
index.
All dates are CE (Common Era) unless otherwise stated.

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